Major Changes for the Crystal Space SDK

The rendering engine, the lighting and the shader systems have all received many improvements.

A new 'render manager' abstraction has been added, abstracting the rendering method used to display the scenes.

A new post-effects system has been added, as well as support for Pixel Buffer Objects and mesh and mesh factories instancing.

The physics plugin based on the Bullet library has been completely re-written, and has now became the default physics plugin instead of ODE.

Many new features have been added to this plugin, such as soft bodies, kinematic objects, terrains and hit beam tests, and many external tools have been added to help the creation, manipulation and animation of those objects.

A new culler has been added, 'occluvis', implementing hardware occlusion visibility culling.

Several new solutions for Level Of Detail management have been added, with a new imposter system replacing automatically 3D meshes by 2D images, and a new progressive Level Of Detail system for a continuous transition between the various levels of detail of a mesh.

A new threaded loader has been added, for the background loading of meshes and other resource files.

A new loader plugin has been added, based on the Assimp library, allowing to load into Crystal Space static and animated meshes from a wide range of different file formats.

The multi-splatting shaders of the 'terrain2' plugin have been improved, as well as the mesh generator. This allows for huge, realistic terrains, filled with foliage and rocks. Terrains have also received new tools to modify and edit them.

A lot of demos, tutorials, tool and test applications have been added.

The 'startme' application has been almost completely re-written for a nicer an a more usable User Interface. Many other applications have been widely improved.

Several tool classes have been added to help the creation of new applications and to give a overall coherence between the demos of Crystal Space.